Providing Better Subject Access to Nonprint Fire Emergency Materials for Illinois Firefighters.

The Illinois Fire Service Institute Library (FSI Library) has the most comprehensive and popular nonprofit fire emergency collection in Illinois. Besides providing providing descriptive cataloging for nonprint materials, the Library assigns in-depth subject terms and modified Library of Congress Classification to the catalog records. The Library reviewed its subject list and found numerous inconsistencies and duplications, because catalog records are acquired from sources using different subject vocabularies. The Library began a project in August 1999 to map the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) from the National Library of Medicine, and other fire vocabulary systems. The project developers created FireTalk, a new FSI thesaurus with a mix of LCSH, MeSH terms (identified as such), plus more specific fire science terms. FireTalk is used with the Library's Online Public Access Catalog at the Institute's website to enhance retrieval of relevant bibliographic citations and facilitate multiple database searching. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]